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Everyone has an opinion on him. But only he knows the truth

‘My story and who I am as a person is something so many people have an opinion on already. Whatever you may think of me now, in the past, or after reading this book, you will have a much better understanding of how the following events came to pass and why. You will see that I am not, and have never been, a supporter of terrorism. I am not a public threat. I did not harm anyone – I never attempted or planned to – nor was I accused of such. And I did not break any Australian, US or international laws.’ – David Hicks

In 1999 a young man from suburban Adelaide set out on an overseas trip that would
change his life forever.

Initially, he was after adventure and the experience of travelling the Silk Road. But events would set him on a different path. He would be deemed a terrorist, one of George W. Bush’s ‘worst of the worst’. He would be incarcerated in one of the world’s most notorious prisons, Guantanamo Bay.

And in that place where, according to an interrogator in Abu Ghraib, ‘even dogs won’t live’, he was to languish for five and a half years, suffering physical and mental abuse, while his fate – and the opinions of all Australians – was shaped by politicians, the media and foreign governments.

Guantanamo: My Journey is an autobiographical account of Hicks’s young adulthood, his overseas travels to Japan, Albania and Pakistan, and the events leading up to his capture in Afghanistan and incarceration in the infamous US military facility at Guantanamo Bay. Released from prison in late 2007, he also tells of his attempt to put his past behind him and enjoy his life in the present.

As the first published account of David Hicks’s life, Guantanamo: My Journey is a confronting picture of unchecked power, the fight for justice and the power of endurance.

About The Author

David Hicks was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1975. After leaving school, he worked as a jackaroo in the Australian outback before settling in Adelaide. Later, he worked as a horse trainer in Japan before witnessing TV reports of atrocities in Kosovo, which motivated him to travel to Albania. Back in Australia, he developed an interest in politics, especially in disadvantaged, oppressed communities. He then embarked on a journey to Kashmir. During the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he was apprehended by the Northern Alliance and sold to the US military, which then sent him to Guantanamo Bay, where he spent five and a half years in detention before returning to Australia.

I awoke on a concrete slab with the sun in my face. I looked around and
saw that
I was in a cage made out of cyclone fencing, the same as the boundary
fence
around my old primary school. Internal fences divided the cage into ten
enclosures, and I was in one of the corner‐end cells. Around me, I saw
five other
concrete slabs with what looked like birdcages constructed on top. A
fence
covered in green shadecloth and topped with rolls of razor wire was
wrapped
around these six concrete slabs, able to house sixty unfortunate human
beings.
Hanging on the inside of this fence were signs saying, ‘If you attempt
escape, you
will be shot’, complete with a featureless person with a target for a
head.
All around the outside of the shadecloth, civilian and uniformed
personnel
cleared and flattened grass and trees. They poured cement and assembled
the
wire cages, calling them ‘blocks’. There was nothing much else around
us except
guard towers boasting large, painted American flags and manned by armed
marines.

My block was only the second to have been built, but that would change
over time. As this prison grew out of the grass, more ‘detainees’, as
they liked to
call us, rather than POWs, arrived. About a month later, around three
hundred
and sixty of us lived in these outdoor enclosures. They were open to
the wind,
sun, dust and rain and offered no respite. The local wildlife was being
disturbed
as their homes were bulldozed to make room for the concrete blocks, and
scorpions, snakes and nine‐inch‐long tarantulas tried to find shelter
in what
were now our enclosures.

My cage, like all the cages, was three steps wide by three steps long. I
shared this space with two small buckets: one to drink out of, the
other to use as
a toilet. There was an ‘isomat’ (a five‐millimetre‐thin foam mat), a
towel, a sheet,
a bottle of shampoo that smelt like industrial cleaner, a bar of soap
(I think), a
toothbrush with three‐quarters of the handle snapped off and a tube of
toothpaste. When I held this tube upside down, even without squeezing,
a white,
smelly liquid oozed out until it was empty.

This bizarre operation was called Camp X‐Ray. Our plane was the first to
arrive on this barren part of the island, and we remained the only
detainees for
the first three or four days. We had been spaced apart because of the
surplus of
cages. Every hour of the day and night, we had to produce our wristband
for
inspection, as well as the end of our toothbrush, in case we had
‘sharpened it into
a weapon’. These constant disturbances prevented us from sleeping. We
were
not allowed to talk, or even look around, and had to stare at the
concrete
between our legs while sitting upright on the ground. If we did lie
flat on the
concrete, we had to stare at a wooden covering a foot or so above our
cages,
which served as some type of roof. Apart from blocking the sun for
about two
hours around high noon, the roof offered no other benefit.
Sitting or lying in the middle of the cage, away from the sides, were
the
only two positions we were allowed to assume. We could not stand up
unless
ordered to, while the biggest sin was to touch the enclosing wire. If we
transgressed any of these rules, even if innocently looking about, we
were dealt
with by the IRF team, an acronym for Instant Reaction Force. The
Military Police
(MP) nicknamed this procedure being ‘earthed’ or ‘IRFed’, because they
would
slam and beat us into the ground.

I first witnessed the IRF team a day or two after my arrival. An MP
stopped outside the cage of an Afghani, my closest neighbour at the
time. He was
the detainee with the prosthetic limb, who had been on the two ships
with me.
The MP demanded to know what the Afghani had scratched into the cement.
He
had not scratched anything and could not even speak or understand
English. I
heard the MP read, ‘Osama will save us.’ The detainee had no idea what
the guard
was on about, yet the MP was furious when he did not respond. ‘I’ll
teach you to
resist,’ the MP threatened and stormed off. Suddenly six MPs in full
riot gear
formed a line outside his cage. The first one held a full‐length
shield. He entered
the cage first, slamming the detainee, pinning him to the cement floor
with the
shield, while the others beat him in the torso and face. The last to
enter the cage
was a military dog handler with a large German shepherd. The dog was
encouraged to bark and growl only centimetres from the Afghani’s face
while he
was being beaten. In later cases, the dogs bit detainees.

When they had finished, they chained him up and carried him out. His
face was covered in blood. A few hours later an MP washed the blood off
the
cement with a scrubbing brush and hose. To add to that injustice, an MP
told me
some weeks later that he himself had scratched that statement into the
cement
before any of us had arrived at Guantanamo, while they had been
training and
awaiting our arrival.

Every two or three days another planeload of detainees would arrive.
They were always made to kneel and lean forward on the gravel while
being
yelled at and struck in the back of the head. They had to balance in
this position
while one detainee at a time was picked up from the line, escorted into
a block
and deposited into a cage. Those who were moved first were lucky not to
have to
endure the stress position for hours. When all the cages in our block
had been
occupied, detainees began to fill the other newly built blocks around
us.
It was around this time that helicopters hovered above and very large
groups of civilians walked through the camp to view us in our cages –
specimens
in an international makeshift zoo.

The first two weeks of Camp X‐Ray was a blur of hardships: no sleeping,
no talking, no moving, no looking, no information. Through a haze of
disbelief
and fear, pain and confusion, we wondered what was going to happen. To
pass
time and relieve the pressure on my ailing back, I chose to lie down
rather than
sit up. During the day I would look slightly to my right, focusing my
vision just
beyond the wooden roof, and lose myself in the sky beyond. It was an
escape, so
peaceful, so blue and full of sunlight. I gazed at the odd cloud and
spied big, black
birds circling high above, called vulture hawks. It was never long,
though, before
a hostile face blocked the view, screaming, ‘What are you looking at?
Look up at
the roof.’ All I could do was sigh and avert my gaze from the infinite,
blue sky to a
piece of wood.